Prerequisite knowledge

What you'll learn

Learn how USA TODAY NETWORKS moved from silos to a single pane of glass

Description

It’s easy to fall into technical silos as your organization scales. With over 500 developers at headquarters alone, the technical silos at USATODAYNETWORK were blatantly apparent. Tracing a problem without hitting a black box was almost impossible.

Over three years, the company enacted a drastic change that took them from complete silos and no interteam communication to a single pane of glass. USATODAY NETWORK’s technical teams shifted their approach to DevOps, making infrastructure everyone’s responsibility rather than just the responsibility of that one team. They migrated their cache provider, monitoring provider, and logging provider in order to provider better tooling to the team. They ironed out alerting, failure tracing for alerts, and communication between teams to ensure that problems are resolved as quickly as possible.

Bridget Lane and Kris Vincent walk you through exactly what they did and how they did it to ensure that organization silos were broken down permanently.

Bridget Lane

Gannett | USA Today

Bridget Lane is a software developer for Gannett and USA Today, where her day-to-day job involves deep-diving into Golang APIs, API management, and cache setup. In her free time, Bridget enjoys cooking, playing board games, and slaying ferocious beasts as a sorcerer in the distant realm of Dungeons and Dragons.

Kris Vincent

Gannett | USA Today

Kris Vincent manages the developer solutions team at Gannett for USATODAYNETWORK. A man of many hats, Kris has been everything from an IT director of a local nonprofit to a DevOps engineer for a cloud-based telephony company. He’s a husband, father, Go developer, DevOps sorcerer, and coffee enthusiast, although not necessarily in that order. In his professional life, he’s passionate about automation, clean code, and comfortable collaborative work environments. Outside of work, he’s passionate about his wife and kids, rock climbing, off-roading, politics, STEAM educational programs, comic book superheroes, and archery.